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by marchustvedt 4170 days ago
Interesting read and sounds like a noble effort. It's a bit of a pivot, but I would think there's a market for better tools for campaigns to target would-be donors. There's clearly demand for anything that is revenue-generating for a campaign, and while I'm not fully versed in your product, I think that smarter access to the data you were tracking could be useful there.

Most serious campaigns, even state level ones, have invested heavily in donor and supporter retention software. But fundraising outside of the painfully repetitive emails, still seems to follow what I found to be rather dated practices. I hosted a campaign event for a Congressional candidate (who ended up winning) and I was shocked at how manual the process was.

Heading into 2016, there sure will be no shortage of campaign dollars (and contracts) up for grabs.

1 comments

That's a great idea honestly. We hadn't really put in thought as to creating better tools for donors. Of course, this idea would only hold any weight if the donors are of substantial wealth. Being able to tell a donor "here's where to put your money based off of the district's political opinions or sway" would also be incredibly valuable, but is it enough to substantiate paying for a service?

I'd be more surprised if people with large amounts of money didn't already know where they were going to put their hard-earned cash. I'd be equally as surprised if those donors didn't already have connections of their own on the hill, at which point they wouldn't need our service for enlightenment (they'd have their own direct source).

I like the idea though, I would just worry about the ability to generate reliable revenue from this. Perhaps also the issue of ethics I wrote about would come into play here. It somewhat might follow the same path as we did when I talked about selling the data to politicians for use on their campaigns.